“The Temple of Man” by R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, 1957
ok no more fearful avoidance, let’s go
There are two volumes of this, to be quite clear. They stand together in a sturdy box.
“The cerebral mind divides elements; in contrast, the Ancient Egyptians spoke of the ‘intelligence of the heart,’ later to be contested by the Greeks when cerebral analysis (metaphysics) began.” ok i think i’m in the right place
This book, it seems, is an extensive treatment of primordial consciousness and symbol familiar from Jung etc., but — through amazing archaeological study — takes that to its natural conclusion by exhaustively documenting its expression as an actual sacred BUILDING-AS-A-TEXT.
It maps the esoteric LANGUAGE expressed by every minute element of the design of the temple of Amun-Mut-Khonsu at Luxor, necessarily drawing out its creators’ implication that this knowledge is only expressible or comprehensible AS human-inhabited physical space.
Why am I interested in this?
I’m still figuring out how to explain it, but it’s the core inquiry behind this account/my life.
I come from a culture that lost a Holy Temple. Its whole mythology is twisted up around that, enmity for Egypt, and non-representation of Divinity. WHY?
Why am I interested in this? I’m still figuring out how to explain it, but it’s the core inquiry behind this account/my life. I come from a culture that lost a Holy Temple. Its whole mythology is twisted up around that, enmity for Egypt, and non-representation of Divinity. WHY?
What are we holding on to by trying to derive purpose in life from repetitive recitation of textual mythologies — VIRTUAL REALITIES — that repeatedly enjoin us NOT to express or experience Divinity in our live environment?
HOW IS THAT GOING FOR US??
I PARTIALLY understand the motivation. The world preys on us. We are enslaved to endure the hardships in place. We find Divine Presence somewhere… “above” this.
But look how the world we have BUILT simply mirrors that miserable condition!
Can’t we BUILD new realities anymore?!
I presume the problem this book will make clear is that the blueprint for building new realities is a deeply integrated esoteric (i.e. sub-cerebral) understanding of the fundamental principles of worlds.
Let’s see if those, as encoded in this Temple, can still be explicated.
Took a forest break this afternoon and was reminded that building a temple is… pretty much in the cards for me and my family in this actual lifetime, and that is a humbling thing to realize at the outset of this book.
“By definition, the Symbol is magic; it evokes the form bound in the spell of matter. To evoke us not to imagine, it is to live; it is to live the form.”
“The ear is not made for hearing. Could it be said that the riverbed and the shape of its banks are made for the river? Sound has made the ear.
…
Thus the doctrine of the Anthropocosmos says: Study the ear to know sound, study the eye to know light.”
“The identity of the Universe and man is the source of his faith, the source of his science, the promise of his deliverance; it is the knowledge of the “tree at the center” (Mosaic Genesis).
[I would take exception to the attribution of Bereishit to “Moses,” but it’s all good]
“Anthropocosmos” is a bit much for me, honestly, but I can go along with it.
“The means of revealing the particularity of one being to another is the symbol. It is a being’s specification. Specifications are affinities and formal appearances in time, space, and motion. … But knowledge requires no medium of transmission, for beings are not separate from Being. Man is not the symbol of the Universe; he is the Universe.”
“Man can bring himself to a vaster perception, but for him the world is what he himself is at each moment. In reality, the world is the totality of what man is in his finality.”
“The Magisterium of the master builder is the realization of this synthesis that consciously establishes the absolute coincidence between Earth and Heaven.”
“As soon as a state of functional confluence takes on a ‘tangible form,’ the supernatural act becomes natural.”
It’s hard to summarize, but this intro on “Elements” establishes a useful point that a PART can only be a valid symbol in terms of its FUNCTION that describes the workings of the Whole, not as a reification of the form of the part. Thus, the abstractness of visionary symbolism.
“When [forms] arrive afterward to specify the function, decadence begins, the fall of Reason into the rational. That is why, in order to penetrate the thoughts of the Ancients, we rely on the architecture and the geometry that guides it, rather than on descriptive texts.”
“Historicism leads to idolatry.”
“The first Diophantine triangle, the 3:4:5, demonstrates, symbolizes, and evokes a function that is universal and invariable; it is THROUGH THIS that such a triangle is sacred, not as a geometric figure. … That which (within ourselves) awakens us to a faith without reasoning: this is sacred, not the faith that is expressed.”
“Man considered as a natural finality is not in opposition to the Universe, he is the ‘mediety’ of the ‘inverse elements’ that are the universal and the particular.”
both of the books I am reading now (the other is “Chiron and the Healing Journey” by Melanie Reinhart) have required me to just jump over a puddle of “Judeo-Christian” stuff that is… well, Christian in order to keep going in a part I am otherwise quite enjoying
“The organs of life are determined in the progression from the mineral to the human. The development of the organs is nothing but a progressive expansion, a widening of consciousness.”
So I’ve read (read: slogged through) Rupert Sheldrake’s first book on “morphogenic fields” as like a cosmic pre-biological principle of evolution that Science™ has the wrong mindset to understand, and I now suspect he read this book, and that he elaborated unnecessarily.
Schwaller de Lubicz here is going no further than to say that an incarnation is a combination of its organic/cellular material and the more basic particulars of its chemistry, and that this explains much of humanity’s spiritual/magical treatment of the body (i.e. funerary rites).
The word “meditation” has now been deployed (pg. 38).
“Western thought never ‘enters into’ a body, does not see it from its living interior outward, from the perspective of its growth and the functional characteristics of its life.”
[This quote is easier to tweet than the tricky Judaic >>> Christian trinity dance that precedes it]
[He sees the trinity as a “concession” that opens the door to rationalism. He doesn’t seem as curious about the Judaic cosmos, but he’s right about this turning, and I suspect he would say the Judaic cosmos lacks SYMBOLIC resonance to prevent this, and I think he might be RIGHT]
[This kind of thing is always extremely risky to say out loud, but I’m saying it anyway: When concrete symbolism is FORBIDDEN, because all form must point directly back to the Absolute, it leaves (too?) little room for INHABITING the divinity of Creation.]
[This doesn’t feel like a very well grounded argument for me, and I am sure there are unfathomable volumes of Jewish thought explaining how wrong I am, but I’m just speaking of what was lacking in my native culture to support me in navigating the world as I encounter it.]
He keeps describing “psychological consciousness” — the reflexive, oriented, conventional “me” point of view — as a REVERSAL of “original consciousness” — identical with the “cosmic genesis” bringing all things about. It’s really hard to summarize, but it feels obviously right.
“This reversal of consciousness—[which] is in identity with the cosmic genesis and equally […] with the specificity of a particular genesis—limits (that is, makes corporeal) this identification and gives rise to the notion of quantity and an apparent separation of objects.”
“Thus IDENTITY between natural objects no longer exists and it is only through ‘Art’ that it can be sought; this accounts for magic, because identity is the source of all magic… [T]wo identical things are no longer separate… and one must undergo what the other undergoes.”
“It is therefore upon the knowledge of functional identity—the philosophy of the Unity—that the magic of religious rituals, the liturgy, and the perfect architecture of the temples are established. …”
“… It is the vital function that is real, however metaphysical it might appear in contrast with the cerebral consciousness that we call physical.”
“Exotericism, that is to say, the objective mental appearance, should serve as a guide for thought, but on the condition that it consider only the vital reality to be the philosophical magnitude that an object symbolizes.”
“The physicist is unwilling to break the circle that opens the door to philosophy, but the evidence of activity with no material base will one day force him to do so.”
“It is difficult to speak of fortuitous coincidences when through millennia one finds the same image used to designate these abstractions. One is…tempted to see here a science rather than pure speculation, a secret and sacred science that tends to show what words cannot convey.”
“Theoretically, it may seem unimportant whether a philosophy is founded on the Unique or on the threefold Unity. But the latter leads to a positivist and rational mentality, within which even dialectical materialism is found.”
“Thought founded on the Unique…does not take appearances for reality. It does not hesitate to speak of metaphysical ‘powers’ and to aim at ultraphysical objectives. The function alone is important to it and not the functioning instrument.”
“In the pharaonic empire, with its single river, thinking governed by the Unique becomes one with this life, which for the mechanistic rationalist remains the insoluble mystery.”
I have a feeling that this sentence will someday convey the entire thousand pages to me.
Remember, the religious problems of MY OWN that I am looking to solve here are about where my own culture — which was CERTAINLY part of this culture for many generations, it’s just hard to say historically which part — turned away from the river.
The author — or the translator, as the case may be — just imposed a dash into the word “in-formation” in speaking of genesis, the first manifestation of particulars, and it made me think of @nobuhojimichaan’s dismembering and re-membering of critical words.
Stopping to integrate: All form is recapitulation of the nature of the Unique, **including its self-reflective reaction energy.** In my own words, BEHAVIOR IS DIVINE, but it IS NOT The Divine. What, then, is idolatry? Worship of form as though it transcends its behavior.
“The most incomprehensible aspect of human nature is its search for the true understanding of natural things through substitutes.”
“Presence is a symbol, a placement in time and space, but the present moment is eternity.”
“[T]he symbol must always be considered as a relationship between two abstract and complementary elements.”
“The symbol is thus the language of a logical function rather than a concept included in a quantitative syllogistic function.”
“The principle of the ‘present moment’ is not a mystical doctrine, but it is a fact that has a mystical character. In exotericism one never demonstrates the cause outside of the system except WITH the system, hence in a duality one of whose poles is left to faith.”
“The symbol demonstrates the esotericism that… unifies that which is divided and puts an end to the problem of causality. The cause, apparently outside of the system, is in it, eternally unified and present, and creation is constant.”
“There can only be one way in this despite the multitude of branchings. The goal is single; there is only one reality, and the most scattered, wildest, little branches send their sap to this heart.”
“Pharaonic Egypt has summarized everything in a symbolic choice it has made from the elements of its environment, a choice so wise that we must bow low before it.”
“Pharaonic Egypt is essentially practical. It deals with Nature and works with natural means, in which it sees the symbols of spiritual states, knowable only intuitively.”
footnote: “This is why myth should be spoken of analytically. We cannot trust that we shall ever arrive at the mythical principle through the juxtaposition (syncretism) of dispersed elements, or that the myth might be a ‘poetic’ construction.”
“[T]he thing, or being — that is, the symbol-type of a lineage — represents integrally, in a vital manner, all the nuances of the functions of this part of Nature that we can in fact know. We may well marvel at the choice of these symbol-types.”
“The position taken in this study excludes the principle of a creation “making light” within a chaotic state. This ‘fact,’ cited in Genesis, takes on an explanatory, ‘unreal,’ exoteric character;” […]
[…] “this explanation, necessary for transmitting the teaching, aims to reveal the reality of the Creation that is no longer situated in time, but figures there always, without beginning or end.”
Chapter 3: ANTHROPOCOSMOS
(lmao this book is insane)
“[Man] is not part of the Whole but the living expression of this Whole; and it is, on the contrary, the Universe that appears as a dispersal of the parts, each one separately alive, and although independent, analyzed with respect to the human Whole.”
footnote: “The geocentric system that was handed down to us through Ptolemy was certainly neither rational nor harmonious, but it answered to a mystical reasoning whereas the heliocentric system leads to mechanistic, analytical rationalism.”
“Moreover, it is obvious that the Universe, for man who sees the sky revolving around him, is what he is himself, for it is man who looks at it, studies it, and judges it.”
“The stellar Universe, therefore, can be none other than the essence of the form and vital functions of this man in his formal and final, present manifestation.”
“This form is actual and not eternal, it is neither definitive in its evolution nor absolute in its present possibilities.”
“The doctrine of the microcosm is not directly concerned with these mechanisms, such as the ear or eye; what pertains to it is localizing the center capable of giving us the intelligence of these perceptions, through coincidences between cosmic and particular events.”
“Cosmic Man, fallen to Earth, turns back over, facing toward Heaven. This is the theological theme in all initiatory temples.
Not only is [one’s] totemic… particularity not an obstacle to this return… its recognition, on the contrary, is an exceptional means of hastening [it]”
“Indeed, any particularity ceases to be when it is universalized within its own character. It is not sufficient… merely to recognize the symbol of one’s lineage; more than that, one’s life must be adapted to it… one must seek to live all its aspects throughout all of Nature.”
